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What do you know about University City, Missouri?

What do you know about University City, Missouri?

Last updated on: June 29, 2017 at 9:05 pm by Jane the Actuary

What do you know about University City, Missouri? 2017-06-29T21:05:44-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Well, to begin with, it’s not Ferguson.

But I spent some time trying to hunt down more information on the city, following my post yesterday about the Jewish cemetery vandalism.

The St. Louis metro area, in general, has a key north/south black/white divide at Delmar Avenue. (See this Washington Post article.) However, in the case of University City, there are three areas — south of Delmar is lily-white, between Delmar and Olive is mixed, and north of Olive is nearly all-black. Here are two maps from the same site I pulled the basic census data from yesterday, the first, showing the white percentage by census block (Delmar underlined in blue):

http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Race-and-Ethnicity

and the second showing the black percentage, similarly, with Olive underlined:

http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Race-and-Ethnicity

How does this affect the city?

To start with, you can form a certain impression from the crime statistics, although the city only reports by regions split into three “north” regions and three “south” regions. Combining the North together and the South likewise, for 2016, here’s what things looked like:

crime stats

You can also take a look at the housing market. I couldn’t find any statistics on this, so I just eyeballed the situation at Realtor.com.

Here’s what seems to be a typical north side house (the St. Louis in the address is because that’s just how it works in the area):

n side house

and a south side house:

s side

And here’s another graphic on race: age distribution, from the same census-data page.

http://statisticalatlas.com/place/Missouri/University-City/Race-and-Ethnicity

It’s striking that there are significantly fewer blacks in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties than older/younger age groups. Does this mean that the “mixed” area is gentrifying, or that there are at least certain trendy neighborhoods popular with that demographic? At the same time, there are dramatically more blacks in the 18 – 19 group; does that mean that blacks are far less likely to go away to college than their white peers?

I know there’s census information out there that would show racial changes over time, but I was coming up empty trying to find it.

I’m not saying that University City is Ferguson, or that it’s a seriously troubled place. I could find no information to suggest that, and I couldn’t really figure out if the elevated crime statistics are at the level that indicates a serious problem or not.

But it seems unlikely that the cemetery vandalism is a Neo-Nazi act.

Top image: University City City Hall. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A2007-03-12_1600x2400_ucity_city_hall.jpg; J. Crocker [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

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